I once read that you can never put your foot in the same river twice, as every time you dip your foot in the river, it is a new river. While this is both true (e.g., the water atoms (hydrogen and oxygen) are different and pebbles at the bottom might have been moved along and new fish might have appeared--or old ones disappeared), it is also untrue (e.g., the Mississipi is not now the Nile).
A human life is often described as a river, beginning as a tiny streamlette and rushing down into full strength. I am not sure where old age fits in, but if a river runs long enough and does not end at the sea it may seem to disappear, sinking perhaps into the earth to an underground cave. More likely new streams and rivers will join it, and it will become more and more grand. Eventually, however, all rivers end. However, in this sense--rivers are made up of contributing bodies of water -- rivers are like communities, with its strength measured in the numbers of collaborating partners. I will have to think more about that metaphor.
It is doubtful that the river ever forgets what it is. The Nile, which as far as we know has no conscious mind (it is not sentient) will never wake up and begin to argue that it is actually the Missouri River and that Lewis and Clark are caught up in dugout canoes on the surface of its waters, wrapped in time warp that encircles and enbraces them like Echinodorus latifolius and Hydrocotyle leucocephala (which are actually amazonian fresh water plants)or even Dwarf Sagittaria, which is described as a completely undemanding plant?
It would seem that as we move along through life, the person we were before would be a part of us, perhaps 1/4 of us that is identifiable in the upper arm, thigh, and forehead and certainly in a percentage of the memory. Certainly one would think that the way we thought in the past would make up a quarter or some percentage of our thinking and that there would be a graceful evolution from Time A, to Time B, to Time X... If this were true, then you could take out any thought and look at it, and identify the root thoughts and the evolutionary process. This does not seem to be the case as it is possible to wake up one morning early and think: My god, how could that child (teenager, young adult) have ever been me? This does not mean you do not like the old you, you may even mourn the non-existence of the old you, but that the old you is a stranger.
1 comment:
I remember once you said you felt as though you could look out the window and see the two of us playing as children. It was if we still existed as separate beings. In a quantum world they probably do as time and history as we know it don't exist. All things are possible. We are completely new people every 90 days or something like that. All our cells are replaced with new ones which is good, but increases the probability that one or two will mutate into something lethal. Life is like that so one should as we say, gather our rosebuds while we may. Think hard what those rosebud are as we only go around once. It is interesting that we were/are both such risk takers. What is that about? We come from a line of risk takers, people who left the old sod early, who moved west early. I think it is part genetic, part the age we lived in.
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